Day 31 - Family Weekend Part 1 - Evelyn Arrives to Shanghai!
Fuxing Road Area, the Bund, Nanjing East Road, Xujiahui
Today I realized that China can be really creative with food. Whether it’s a signature dish or dish with exotic ingredients, Shanghainese people know how to keep us foreigners entertained with our cameras ready to capture the thing we are are about devour. My aunt brought my cousin and I to a hotel near Fuxing Road to eat brunch dim sum. It was even more fun because my cousin enjoys taking photos of food as well. The dish that highlighted my food explorations in China for that week had to be the Chong You Bing (Chinese Spring Onion “Pizza”) made into a hollowed bubble. It is so amazing how Chinese people can make something like this! YUM!
After lunch I attend the Three by the Bund exhibition for a Japanese architect named Kenzo Kuma. I had no idea what his work was like, but he did not present his work very well. I was pretty much bored out of my mind. I was pretty impressed by the headphone translation set-up, where we exchanged our ID cards for a headset that we could flip to a channel for English. While I liked looking at some of the pictures of Kenzo Kuma’s work, he said nothing about the topic of the exhibition, which didn’t really surprise me. After attending lectures at RSA over the past two semesters, you can’t expect every architect to talk so much about a topic without referring to his/her own work. However, Wu Jiang, the Vice President of Tongji University, was pretty impressive with his talk. He looked at the challenges that China is facing and bashed the World Expo’s theme, “Better City, Better Life.” His issues were all somewhat eye-opening for me, especially how all the rural areas of China are becoming extinct because more and more farmers are migrating to the cities. While I know this happens everywhere (even in the USA), I feel like the rural part of China is so much a part of the culture, and if it doesn’t have that, it will lose so much of what China is.
